In the mythology of the Montreal music scene, AIDS Wolf are the anti–Arcade Fire. Both bands began in 2003, and soon found themselves at the epicentre of an unlikely musical moment where New York Times coverage and Seattle-esque generalizations about Montreal’s “sound” became de rigeur. That, however, is where the similarities end. With a cacophonous crossbreed of noise-rock and hardcore punk, AIDS Wolf’s bickering guitars, spazz-jazz drumming and screeching female vocals can singe the hairs off of even the most open ears. Consequently, as Arcade Fire rose like a mushroom cloud over Montreal’s indie-rock explosion, AIDS Wolf settled into the cracks and crevices of the scene like radioactive fallout.

But nuclear fallout is notoriously stubborn, with a propensity for extended contamination brought on by an unforgiving half-life. The members of AIDS Wolf have this kind of chemical tenacity bred right into their DNA.

Singer Chloe Lum admits, “When you’re playing this kind of music, it’s easy to get discouraged or burn out.” It probably doesn’t help that AIDS Wolf, more than any other noise act, have been subjected to a fairly regular critical razing. And yet six years into their career, with scads of international touring logged on their passports and a stunning second full-length, Cities of Glass, in tow, the band are at the peak of their powers. According to Lum, they have “no intention of stopping any time soon, barring death.”

The decade-long partnership of Lum and drummer Yannick Desranleau has spanned many bands (including Da Bloody Gashes and Electric End) and a successful graphics company called Seripop (clients include Arcade Fire and MSTRKRFT, whose Seripop-designed album cover won a Juno for CD/DVD Artwork Design of the Year) and are bound by a determined work ethic rooted in a philosophical ethos that could be described as the Tao of Rollins. “We were both reading Get in the Van [Henry Rollins’ Black Flag tour journals] when we quit our day jobs and dropped out of school,” says Lum. “[The Flag style of econo artistic venture] basically became a religion for us — living very cheaply and spending every waking moment on your creative pursuits, and not letting anybody’s derision or bullshit or whatever or petty crap deter you at all.”

This philosophy came in especially handy when the band released its self-recorded debut in 2006. The Lovvers absolutely polarized critics; a sizeable contingent swooned over the experimentation, but those who hated it took issue with everything from the band’s name to their full-frontal naked publicity photos and, of course, the extremity of their noise aesthetic (“Shit in wolf’s clothing” and “sounds like nine-year-old kids on acid” isn’t exactly constructive criticism).

“When the first album came out, we expected it to be like every other project we’d been in: quietly ignored, and a couple weirdos here and there would dig it. But a lot of people seemed to want to write about us just to say how much we sucked,” says Lum. “We just used that to build ourselves up and kind of put ourselves in this position of an imaginary war against everybody else.”

The ill-tempered backlash continued right up until last April with conceptual artist Brendan Fowler’s art installation targeting AIDS Wolf and Jay Reatard for their “socially questionable” nomenclature. The piece — basically a flyer for each band with “CANCELLED” stencilled across the listing, tagged at $1,500 apiece. But the debate has always been baffling for a group who named themselves after a serendipitous piece of graffiti (Lum and Desranleau spotted the tag and took it as an omen to start a new project while they were dissolving their previous band).

It’s one thing to be slagged in print or on canvas, but it’s another thing entirely to have to deal with it in person, with Lum dishing out the occasional heckler-shushing beatdown. The live show is where AIDS Wolf get to inflict collateral damage. “You need to make a bit of a mental game out of it,” says Lum. “When you’re playing unpopular music you need to psyche yourself up. Turning all the negative shit that comes our way — it’s basically like a dare.”

This daring has even resulted in AIDS Wolf performing in an unlikely destination: Israel. After touring with Monotonix, they were offered a week of gigs in the holy land at the behest of Monotonix’s Israeli promoter. Though the mini-tour got off to a rocky start (playing to six people in a venue that holds 800, intensive immigration searches and 17-year old kids with machine guns), Lum says they were amazed by the generally positive reception.

“There were people who knew about our band, but most people who were coming to our shows had never heard of us before. They were just like, ‘Oh, a punk-rock band from North America, cool. Only 30 shekels!’” If only our audiences were less precious about being sonically assaulted, maybe Time would have chosen a noisier Montreal band for its cover.